Suchergebnisse

Examines the impact of the Internet & other technological advances on the modern perception of capitalism, & discusses the importance of the emerging virtual/technological class. It is argued that the virtual class has blindly pursued the realization of a fully technological society, & has thereby bypassed personal ethics or any concern regarding the possibility for aesthetic creativity, social solidarity, democratic discourse, or economic justice. Under these circumstances, human concerns are sacrificed to technological advance, & the primacy of information surpasses that of the body & mind. It is suggested that the virtual class is aggressive & predatory, & that the success of a virtual postcapitalist system will erode the integrity of the state & divide the globe into three virtual classes: master function (virtual class), clone, & slave function. The slave-function class is already apparent in Third World nations where economic failure has subjected citizens to manifestations of predatory & unregulated capitalism, eg, child labor & black-market organ trade. It is concluded that the unchecked pursuit of the virtual world could destroy currently realized social advances, & lead to the abuses & inequalities characteristic of the colonial era. T. Sevier

Like so many technologies before it, the drone promises liberation from the burdens of human existence: from work, wanting, waiting and even war. The drone, we are told, will watch our cities and our borders, it will deliver our goods and dispose of our enemies. It will do all this while keeping human bodies—or, rather, certain select human bodies—safe from harm (Chamayou 2015). Yet once the drone is abstracted away from the unmanned aerial vehicle and understood as the figure of autonomous, sensing technology (Andrejevic 2015), its logics become ubiquitous and its complex imbrications with our bodies inescapable. Essential to the emergent drone assemblage and to the affective form of its promise is the rising tide of techno-capitalism: military manufacturers, tech giants, start-ups, robotics labs, venture capitalists (Benjamin 2013, Gusterson 2017). This enfolding of military, industry and finance capital into the networked and mediating infrastructures of contemporary life means that drone capital is increasingly entangled in the everyday, impinging upon bodies and producing new modes, forms and flows of relation between the corporeal and the technical. Thus the promise of the drone is also the promise of a future transformed: of modes and flows of capital freed even further from the strictures and constraints of human labour; of space and temporality controlled; of technoaffected experiences of the body itself. Tracing the movements of drone capital from military expenditure, automated finance and logistics, this paper maps the affects of hope and anxiety that accumulate around the ambivalent figure of the drone and its bodily entanglements, impingements and potentials.

The growing centrality of risk management in pro-market governance raises important questions regarding how risks are produced, and why? Who and what is included in, and excluded from, risk management, and why? And, what is the relationship between the rise of risk management and neoliberalism? Drawing on various political economy approaches, this volume addresses these questions by examining - both analytically and empirically - diverse meanings and practices of risk management across a range of scales and themes ranging from austerity to climate change to housing and debt. The authors investigate the relationship between shifts in contemporary capitalism and the ways in which neoliberal forms of risk management have emerged, been reproduced and normalized, and, transformed historically.

Over the last decade, political economists and other macro-oriented scholars have increasingly focused on the comparative specificities of distinct capitalist systems. Mostly, these systems are studied as national systems. Such models of capitalism are often studied with reference to various institutional dimensions: financial systems, labour relations, welfare state institutions, corporate governance, economic policy making, etc. This volume brings innovative and synthetic contributions combining as many as these institutional dimensions as possible. The issue contains papers by Robert Boyer, A. Tylecote & F. Visintin, Chris McNally & William Lazonick. It also contains a special section based on a contribution by Michael Shalev, "Limits and alternatives to multiple regression in comparative political economy", which addresses techniques of analysing the variety of political-economic constellations in a methodological way. Shalev's views are critically scrutinized by a number of leading scholars, including Charles Ragin, Ro Rothstein, Gosta Esping-Andersen, Jonas Pontusson and others.

AbstractThis article aims to incorporate the essential features of capitalism in an operational definition that identifies capitalism per se (pure laissez‐faire capitalism), and clearly excludes variations such as welfare capitalism and crony capitalism. By concisely highlighting the fundamental structures and mechanisms of capitalism, this essential definition facilitates defences of it that are more robust than those ordinarily offered. It also clarifies the relation between capitalism and phenomena with which it is frequently associated, and suggests a straightforward way of identifying and measuring the extent of capitalism in mixed economies.

"This book examines the dynamic ways in which millions of ethnic Chinese in East and Southeast Asian economies organize their economic activities. It analyses how Chinese capitalism has changed under conditions of contemporary globalization and anticipates what the future holds for it. The book challenges the conventional notion of Chinese capitalism as 'crony capitalism' based around kinship networks and untouched by globalization. Yeung argues rather that key actors are capable of taking advantage of their participation in globlization processes to significantly transform the nature and organization of Chinese capitalism in East and Southeast Asia. He concludes that the system that is emerging is neither distinctively Chinese nor converging towards the Anglo-American form of capitalism, but a hybrid of both."--Half title page